You are the Coolest cat on the web PERIOD! No one wants to share anything anymore. They tell you "Trail and Error". I don't have the money for school right now, so I don't have all day. I'm trying to get a good sounding Demo out. Thanks man, I pray God gives you everything you need for sharing your wisdom.

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Hey I really appreciate that. You're right.. it's hard to find a true reference.. I, like you could not afford school and couldn't have left my kid to go if I could have afforded it. A lot of cats are stingy with what they know.. some cats will even mislead you to protect their secrets. After struggling for sooooooo long to get anywhere that I wanted to be, I promised myself I would share what I learned with everyone if I ever learned anything.. I don't claim to know it all.. but I have learned a lot and I'm thankful if I can speed up the learning curve for even one person who is experiencing the same frustration I went through. Thanks again and god bless!

Wow! Just checked out the site... Dexter beat, out cold. I thought I was the only one who thought that would be a good sample.

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Oh man as soon as I heard it the first time the hairs on my neck stood up and I knew... I thought to myself.. "there's no way someone hasn't already used this!" but I haven't heard it anywhere else yet.. surprisingly.. that sample is soooo sic.. props to the composer Daniel Licht..

@ cue If you're in East Saint then yer about 21/2 hours from me.. I'm due east from there on the IN/IL border.

There are many ways to accomplish these two tricks and most of them are equally effective.. the most common problem surrounding these techniques is that the information out there about them is convoluted. I'd like to try and simplify the theory behind them and then you can decide which method to use because you'll know how to do it on your own..

First what is parallel compression? Simply put this is taking a sound source like an audio track.. duplicating it... compressing each one differently.. (usually one dry and one very compressed) and then you blend the two copies back into the song.. together they will provide a nice full sound.. the benefit of doing this is that you can use extreme compression settings while being much less destructive to the sound because you still have an original dry version of the sound blended in and only the copy is being heavily compressed... this is a great trick that is widely used.. experiemnt with it.. more often then not I'll put a little compression on the dry copy and A LOT of compression on the copy... so in terms of different ways to do this.. remember.. you simply have to split the sound source to two tracks and compress them differently.. so in reason you can use an audio splitter merger sending one sound to two channels for example.. or you can simply duplicate the track and the audio file on it.. you could take a track and use a send to ship a copy of that track to another channel where you apply the compression.. lot's of easy ways to go about this and it will pay off big time.

Now.. Multiband Compression.. or in general let's focus even more in general terms and just say "multiband processing" since it's not at all limited to compression.

I like to think of it as resolution.. you can compress a whole audio track and it's going to have a broad effect on the track.. but if you can split one sound into several versions of the sound in different frequency ranges.. then you can really effect specific frequencies in the sound without effecting other parts that don't need anything..

The idea is this.. you take one sound source like an audio track.. vocals.. instrument.. drums.. anything.... You then split that single sound source into several copies.. you want to create freuency splits that cover the whole range of the sound.. so let's do a simplified example.. imagine you take a kick drum and duplicate it so that you have 3 copies of the kick drum.. on the first copy you would filter out all but the low end... on the second copy you would filter out all but the mid range freqencies.. on the third copy you would filter out everything but high frequencies.. you now have individual control over effecting each range seperately.. low mids and highs..

This allows a lot of things.. for one, much like parallel compression it allows you to use more extreme settings while being less destructive to the audio.. it's just like pixels.. the more pixels the finer the resolution and the clearer you can make the picture.. This is a great way to enhance the great things about a sound without also enhancing problem frequencies.. You can break a sound into as many splits as you want.. again there are several ways to do this.. make several duplicates.. split with sends or a splitter.. etc.. then break the sound down into equal frequency splits a crossed the entire frequency range.. once you're comfortable with the basics of doing this.. you can start automating fader levels to change the sound in just certain parts of the song to just part of a sound... it really adds a lot of resolution to your project and gives you new dimensions to work with in your mix.. I think maybe I'll cut a video on these two techniques if anyone is interested.. as always.. best of luck to you. pz.

This trick is REALLY common and I suspect many of you already do this, but I want to be sure of it as it is a really simple way to make great progress toward giving your vocals "that sound"

Ok.. the setup.. when you record your verse, record 1 lead.. and only 1 double.. on the double take.. cover the entire verse as if you were doing the lead and do your best to spit it EXACTLY the same as you did the first time around... now.. duplicate that double take.. pan the first double hard left.. and pan the second double hard right.. already you probably find this somewhat similar to the normal structure of how you stack your vocal takes.. BUT.. here is where the magic comes in..

Manual delay.. as the name implies, a simple explanation of delay is that the audio on the track is delayed from the original source material so that it plays a matter of milliseconds later than it was recorded... delay is very common and most use it to some extent.. but you don't need a plug-in or delay effect unit to do it.. and we're going to take it a step further.. which brings me to...

Pre-Delay.. most of the time you think of delay as an echo of sorts that is late from the orignal source audio.. but delay can also mean that the sound occurs BEFORE the original source material.. and when you mix both delay and pre-delay.. you get a a great big full sound!

So.. take the first double.. making sure you are not locked to the grid.. zoom in a lot until you can really see the transients of the waveform.. now.. nudge the first vocal backwards so that it drops a matter of milliseconds before the lead comes in.. we're talking maybe 10 = 12 ms at most and often much less.. you're going to take the second double now, which remember is an exact duplicate of the 1st double you recorded, and that is hugely important to this effect.. you're going to delay it by nudging it forward on the timeline a matter of milliseconds after the original lead vocal take.. You'll want to adjust the two doubles and the respective delays to taste.. it shouldn't be obvious to the point that you actually hear any echo.. it will sound almost mono since they are panned hard left and right which is part of the effect.. so even though you might not normally pan the doubles hard left and right.. make sure you do for this effect to get the full benefit. This gives your vocals that gliding silky sound that is so highly sought after.. you may or may not want to go on and record additional vocal takes to stack and pan out, and then your adlibs.. this greatly enhances the sound of the vocals and can help you get a much more professional sound.. I assure you that if you're not doing this and didn't know about it.. you will find this trick to be huge, and will enhance the other effects that you add to your vocals otherwise, and in some cases you will find that you don't need some of the effects you might ordinarily use in an effort to get that sound.. best of luck!